Extracellular vesicles (EVs) can mediate intercellular communication, including signaling between the placenta and maternal tissues. Human placental explant culture is a versatile in vitro model system to investigate function. We performed systematic studies identify defined serum-free medium that supports high trophoblast viability metabolism, as well release of similar populations EVs, compar...

BACKGROUND Gonadal dysgenesis (GD) is associated with increased risk of gonadal malignancy. Determining a patient's risk and appropriate timing of gonadectomy is challenging, but immunohistochemical markers (IHM) may help establish the diagnosis of malignant germ cell tumors (GCT). Our objective was to identify the prevalence of specific IHM expression in patients with GD and determine if the p...

Lateral assemblies of glycolipids and cholesterol, "rafts," have been implicated to play a role in cellular processes like membrane sorting, signal transduction, and cell adhesion. We studied the structure of raft domains in the plasma membrane of non-polarized cells. Overexpressed plasma membrane markers were evenly distributed in the plasma membrane. We compared the patching behavior of pairs...

When fused in-frame with a C-terminal propeptide of placental alkaline phosphatase (PLAP), rat alpha 2u-globulin (alpha GL), a nonglycosylated secretory protein, was expressed on the cell surface as a glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-linked chimaeric protein (alpha GL-PLAP). In contrast with the wild-type alpha GL-PLAP, a mutant, in which Asp at the cleavage/attachment site of GPI was replace...

Action-probabilistic logic programs (ap-programs) are a class of probabilistic logic programs that have been extensively used during the last few years for modeling behaviors of entities. Rules in ap-programs have the form “If the environment in which entity E operates satisfies certain conditions, then the probability that E will take some action A is between L and U”. Given an ap-program, we ...

In contrast to Madin-Darby canine kidney cells, Fischer rat thyroid cells deliver the majority of endogenous glycosylphosphatidyl inositol (GPI)-anchored proteins to the basolateral surface. However, we report here that the GPI proteins Placental Alkaline Phosphatase (PLAP) and Neurotrophin Receptor-Placental Alkaline Phosphatase (NTR-PLAP) are apically localized in transfected Fischer rat thyr...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the prepubertal prevalence of intratubular germ cell neoplasia of the unclassified type (ITGCNU) and its significance as a predictor of testicular cancer and to evaluate the effect of early orchiopexy (at younger than 2 years of age) on subsequent fertility of patients with bilateral cryptorchidism. METHODS Testicular biopsies (n = 660) from 440 prepubertal patients ...

With the increasing popularization and development of WiFi devices, nowadays WiFi-based indoor localization has become a hot topic. Traditional Wi-Fi-based technologies which utilize received signal strength indication suffer from multi-path effects result in performance degradation. Therefore, choosing appropriate characteristic is crucial for localization. To improve accuracy, we propose PLAP...

Placental alkaline phosphatase (PLAP) is anchored in the plasma membrane by a phosphatidylinositol-glycan moiety (PI-glycan). PI-glycan is added posttranslationally to the nascent peptide chain after the removal of 29 amino acids from the COOH-terminus. The contribution of selected COOH-terminal amino acids to the signal for PI-glycan addition was tested by creating a fusion protein with the CO...

Alkaline phosphatase (AP) is a potential therapeutic agent in the treatment of sepsis. In this paper the potential of capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) for the monitoring of the degradation of placental alkaline phosphatase (PLAP) was investigated. To induce degradation PLAP samples were exposed to high temperatures, low and high pH and freeze-drying. The samples were then analyzed by CZE an...